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The game remains the same - mostly

The most panted-over video game release of the past week – aside from the annual advent of the latest Madden football game – was Bionic Commando Rearmed , a remake of Capcom's legendary (and legendarily merciless) NES robot-arm-swingin' classic from 1988.

By Darren ZenkoSpecial to the Star

Sun., Aug. 17, 2008

The most panted-over video game release of the past week – aside from the annual advent of the latest Madden football game – was Bionic Commando Rearmed, a remake of Capcom's legendary (and legendarily merciless) NES robot-arm-swingin' classic from 1988.

Unlike standard remakes (Ninja Gaiden, etc.) that take beloved old brands and revision them as modern 3D games, Rearmed drapes a candy-coating of today's graphics, sounds and features over a crunchy centre of gameplay and structure essentially identical to that which wowed the rumpus-room set in the heart of the Mulroney years.

BC Rearmed isn't an isolated experiment either. "Updated classics" – prettied-up but otherwise unchanged – dropped on an audience whose consoles possess more computing power than existed in the entire world at the time the games were originally developed, are regularly gathering constellations of starry ratings from dazzled critics and racking up top-notch sales figures decades after their original sell-by dates. What's the deal?

Well, first, the fundamentals of fun don't change. Take the example of Space Invaders Extreme, which hit North America two months ago, a full 30 years after its namesake debuted amid disco beats. Review aggregator Metacritic's score is 85 per cent, putting it well in the top tier of this year's games. But underneath that layer of the shiniest "retro" graphics this generation's handheld systems can pump out it's still the same game that captured a planet and drew so much change from the pockets and purses of Japan that it triggered a coinage crisis.

Adjust for technological inflation, and there's nothing to Space Invaders that a kid in a Coney Island shooting gallery – or a bored Mongol archer, or a caveman with some spare rocks – couldn't understand and enjoy.

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"Adjusting for technological inflation" is the second thing these remakes do really well. There's a set of basic skills, a vocabulary of interactions, that modern games rely on; hand one of today's 20-button controllers to someone who's never played before, and they're not exactly going to light up the Halo 3 leaderboards.

You need to be able to ask the location of la salle de bain before you can read Proust in the original French. Example: In 1980, people who had never even heard the word "joystick," let alone handled one (a pause, here, for schoolyard giggles) took to Pac-Man – a game with four player inputs, delivered through a single control surface – by the millions.

Last year's remake, Pac-Man Championship Edition, was one of the best-reviewed games of 2007, and sold (via download) like hotcakes with a wedge sliced out of them.

As simple as it is, Pac-Man is Boot Camp, basic training for all the space wars, fantasy battles and kung-fu campaigns that followed ... and it's fun, and it's deep. At a basic level, Pac-Man is an adrenaline-pumping reflex game of avoidance, pathfinding, staying one step ahead of those damned ghosts, and making intuitive (or accidental) use of your pizza-pie hero's ability to change the rules and turn hunter to hunted. At a higher level, it's a game of pure pattern memorization, of training twitching muscles to do the right thing without slowpoke consciousness getting in the way. Only with the pathways of Pac-Man or something elemental like it engraved in your grey matter are you able to actually play video games.

Space Invaders ... Pac-Man ... whether remade or simply replayed, these medium-defining masterpieces retain their power because they got it right the first time.

Now, Bionic Commando isn't nearly so pure as these elementals, but it tells us the same thing: game design transcends technology. In gel-tinted monochrome or in 1080p hi-def, in the corner of a stanky roller-rink or in the comfort of your own home, a good game won't – can't! – lose its captivating power.

Darren Zenko has been writing about video games for nine years.

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